Fascism as Pseudo-Socialism

by W. F. Haug

7 Stage‑management and representation
at a general social and state level, e.g. fascism as pseudo‑socialism

Walter Benjamin in his famous essay ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has shown what importance the ‘aestheticization
of politics’ had for fascism. [40] He pointed
out the sophisticated construction of separating need from its expression and
pompously developing the mere expression by aesthetic means against the needs
and rights of the people. In his words:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without
affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism
sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance
to express themselves.

And he continues in a footnote:

In big parades and monster rallies, in sports
events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound
recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process,
whose significance need not be stressed; is intimately connected with the
development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements
are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. [41]

After the footnote the text continues:

The masses have a right to change property relations;
Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical
result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. [42]

In his essay Benjamin seems especially fascinated by the
influence of technology on social relationships and their connotations. On the
other hand, however, he neglects the economic forms and functions, and in the
work of his disciples this gap threatens to suppress completely the beginning
of an economic foundation to the analyses. In the quoted passages above, the
fascist aestheticization of politics is understood to be an illusory solution
to the contradiction of property relations and the ‘right’ of the masses to
change them. This false solution consists of engineering the aesthetic enjoyment
and self‑interaction of the masses in a way that helps to preserve existing
property relations. Without doubt Benjamin has pinpointed the functional relation
of aestheticization and the preservation of domination. But this insight needs
to be developed, and extended in two directions.

1 It is not the technical apparatus which
creates a medium of expression for the masses; it is effective only where a
mere aesthetic copy can be used as a kind of amplification of the original.
Rather it is the momentum of the masses, workers’ struggles for higher wages,
for limited working hours, against child labour, against arbitrary dismissals,
for the right to work and—sooner or later as a necessary consequencefor
socialism, that is, the struggle of many generations of workers which developed
on the basis of their economically determined concentration in large industries,
which created the many forms of expression that the stage‑managers of
fascism adopted. They made an aesthetic copy of the workers’ movement, adding
ingredients of petit‑bourgeois and peasant nostalgia for the soil, blood-ties,
guilds, carnivals, church, and ceremonies of consecration, and they organized
it according to the latest insights, applying proven industrial and marketing
techniques of social engineering, usually from the USA. In short, they created
a political sphere from which all decision‑making processes were removed,
according to the Führer‑principle, so that nothing was left but the
mere phantom‑like shellits carefully created exterior. And they
converted this remaining political shell into a total work of art.

Two points must be mentioned here. Firstly, there
is the position of the artist: many were finding work, a living, and fame, in
the sudden demand from the state for window dressing, cult objects, stage‑design,
and representational art of a specific kind. To many who had known the horrors
of extreme poverty this meant salvation. The historical result, of course, meant
destruction for them too.

The second point concerns the after‑effects
still felt today of this large-scale aestheticization of depoliticized politics
based on ‘stealing from the commune’ (Bloch). Its function in those days was
to politically overwhelm the workers (i.e. the mass of employees, petit‑bourgeoisie
and peasants), by separating the expression of the working‑class movement
from the movement itself and its objectives, and by separately satisfying the
declared needs of the workers by means of aesthetic fascination. These superficial
‘borrowings’ from the communists, therefore, were turned into weapons against
communism, and rounded off the success of the Gestapo and the concentration
camps. Today, after the destruction of fascism, this bygone technique of anti‑communist
aestheticization strangely continues to exist. When today organizations in the
working‑class movement or their sympathizers revert to using old forms
of expression which fascism temporarily seized as its own during the Third Reich,
the propaganda of the ruling class responds with a subtle move which many find
difficult to see through. Since, naturally, there are many apparent parallels
with the fascists—unsurprising since fascism aimed at surface resemblances—now
that fascism is taboo, the left is equated with the fascists. In the equation,
red = brown, the fascist version of anti‑communism once again fulfils
its function of bewildering the masses. Intellectuals who remain on the surface
and who have an acute sense for creating effect, like Günter Grass, easily fall
for this second‑degree aestheticization, which they then propagate to
the best of their abilities.

2 Benjamin's theory of fascism’s aestheticization
of politics must be considered more deeply from another angle. He overlooks
the high status of mere illusion in capitalism, an inevitable product of the
economic basic relations, and originating fully in the economic structure of
bourgeois society in its normal conditionif one dare calls its non‑fascist
constitution a normal condition. As has already been shown, the aestheticization
of commodities is a necessary consequence of exchange. It is a fact that at
all levels of the system in bourgeois society the people's vital interests are
neither the highest objective nor the determining aim. To the
extent that in the social relations corresponding to the different levels of
social life it is necessary to make these relations appear to serve vital human
needs directly and exclusively, the ruling class is forced to create a kind
of expression and justifying scenario, to produce the illusion that social relations
really do serve the vital needs of all. This illusion must convey complete classlessness,
justice, humanity, welfare, etc. and/or make subjugation, service, discipline
and sacrifice, appear to be natural and the highest fulfilment. Every expression
which gains the trust of the masses or, in the jargon, ‘has credit’, will be
brought into play and stripped of the concrete endeavours it once expressed.
Hence it is necessarily the mere abstraction of an expression which is nothing
other than aestheticization. The activities of aesthetics’ producers meet this
demand in its form, but not in its content, nor from the outset
according to subjective motivation.

The aestheticization, not only of politics, lies
therefore at the very heart of bourgeois society. Also intrinsic to it is the
need on the one hand constantly to legitimize the ruling class, while creating
the needs of their subjects on the other, both of which can find only the illusory
satisfaction of amongst other things aesthetic images inside and through the
capitalist system. But we must stress one fact: not everything that is a false
illusion is a deception—only most of it. The additional factor, without which
the social deception would not work is, of course, self-deception. The consciously‑engineered
technical deception, the political ratio essendi, that earns profits
for many industrial giants today, could not work without the self‑deception
of the subscribers to the Bild newspaper. This self-deception, in turn,
would not operate so smoothly without a whole chain of numerous middlemen whose
business is deception and self-deception. [43]
Without an opium of the people there can be no opium for the people. This can
be applied to the world of pop music, as well as, mutatis mutandis, to
the magic of Bayreuth and its representative holy festivals where, under the
eyes of the cameras, the leading politicians rub shoulders with the tycoons,
the bankers and the generals; where the personifications of power, domination
and force appear publicly on the dizzy heights of culture.

[Notes]

43 With reference
to the bourgeois economists and philosophers, Marx explains in an aside this
fusion of deception and self-deception; the deception being possible only through
the self-deception of those who deceive the public. In volume II of Capital,
Marx describes ‘the label of a system of ideas’, which is no different from
the fully developed situation today, which we term its commodity‑aesthetic
appearance: ‘The label of a system of ideas is distinguished from that of other
articles, among other things, by the fact that it deceives not only the buyer,
but often the seller as well. Quesnay himself, and his closest disciples, believed
in their feudal signboard. [another early form of advertising] Our academic
pedants do the same to this very day’ (p. 435 f.)